Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

You know, for someone who expresses their hatred of contrarians so often, I really don't get along with the world.

I liked live-action Cowboy Bebop. And predictably the whole world seems against the show, lol.

I had expected far worse. It's fine. It's not exactly the Cowboy Bebop that I held dear, but, you know, it's fine. That - THE Cowboy Bebop - is not what I wanted to see anyway. I mean, what would be the point?

I'm relieved now.

[miscmisc]

It does seem clear that there are significantly more immunocompromised/immunologically weak people among us than previously thought. That's another important discovery made possible by this mega pandemic.

Those people need to be protected by the society at large as the vaccines don't do much for them. SARS-CoV-2 seems extremely good at finding them.

[miscmisc]

Austria's decision to mandate vaccination seems to you a bit harsh, or "courageous" in the Yes, Minister sense of the word, and it may be, but I know a guy who grew up in Linz, Austria. He's told me over and over again that the Covid "freedom" porn is considerably worse in his home town/region than it is in Texas, and he seems to welcome the government's decision because, well, "Fuck those far-right, right-wing freedom monkey bitches," verbatim.

[miscmisc]

I thought according to the Modern Monetary Theory, you need taxation to fight inflation. They say it's not really for funding the state, remember?

Funny I don't see any vocal MMT-ers advocate raising taxes now. A bit intellectually inconsistent and unserious, aren't they?

[miscmisc]

Sunetra Gupta. Jay Bhattacharya. Martin Kulldorff. The main authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

We will have to hold these scumbags accountable. There is a special place in hell for scientists who fuck with public health for their own careers. I can assure you that none of these ghouls rationally believe what they are saying anymore. They do "believe" but not on any objective, rational basis, no different from the faith in God. They are either fighting their inner angel every day, or too mentally weak not to have already transformed into full-fledged conspiracy theorists, so as to preserve their own demented intellectual integrity.

Either way, these are some of the very worst people in this pandemic.

[miscmisc]

This is the wrong woke, total stupidity, based largely on the "social science studies" that couldn't replicate. The result will be dumber, slyer students, and fewer Asian American students too (racial equilibrium!). And it's getting worse, putting gasoline into the anti-woke fire.

[miscmisc]

LOL @ this typical Straussian moron.

I tried to go farthest away from this kind of people, and ended up being where I am. I see so many demons in and around my place too, but at least none of these pathetic Defenders of the Western Civilization would be considered major political theorists or "philosophers" around here.

[miscmisc]

There is really something wrong with this extremely narcissistic compulsive liar.

[miscmisc]

Anne Applebaum used to be THE punching bag in this thread back in the days, but I stopped even mentioning her a while ago, despite the fact that she has been very visible and vocal recently.

That's because what I was saying would happen to her has happened. I knew where her shallowness and intellectual laziness will take her. I actually always agreed with her that authoritarianism was bad, that fascism was bad, and that Stalinism was bad. But she was too stupid to notice that she and her lazy arguments were contributing massively to the very things and people that she was supposed to loathe.

I didn't even read her latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, because I knew it would be a waste of time, her desperate attempt to make excuses and then go deeper into denial. And David Klion's review confirmed it.

Ex-Friends
Anne Applebaum and the crisis of centrist politics.
www.thenation.com/article/politics/anne-applebaum-twilight-democracy/

If Applebaum was blindsided by the turn that some of her friends have made to the far right over the past decade, she may not be the best judge of which intellectuals carry latent fascist tendencies today.

Yup, indeed. She's just too stupid to be what she wants to be.

[miscmisc]

You can tell how strongly rooted vaccine hesitancy in Germany is from the fact that a disconcertingly high percentage of elderly people in the country are still unvaccinated, on top of the not-terrible-but-not-so-good-either vaccination rates overall. In other words, the unvaccinated are relatively evenly distributed among ages, which is not the case in the UK, France etc.

That should make Germany extra vulnerable to a Delta surge in terms of hospitalizations and deaths.

[miscmisc]

I wonder how many people know that if you are hospitalized as a moderate-severe Covid patient, you are likely to be given medications that are highly risky in terms of side effects, risky enough to render the whole debate about the vaccine side effects/long-term uncertainties utterly silly in comparison.

And yes, a huge number of people have already died worldwide because of the complications caused by the medicine for Covid treatment. A HUGE number of people, because that kind of stuff happens at the hospital. We refrain from talking too much about them simply as a certain kind of social etiquette, as that's the reality of health care that we must tacitly accept.

And you never hear a beep about that reality from the idiotic anti-vaxxers who advocate "natural immunity", and it's pretty clear that that's because they simply don't have a fucking clue.

[miscmisc]

"lose track"

I mean, Churchill drank every morning, but wouldn't "forgive me" you like this, ever.

[miscmisc]

Travel ban is usually a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted, as is probably the case with the new variant. In all likelihood it's already everywhere.

I had a problem with all the booster talk while understanding the effectiveness of it, because I saw no serious attempt by the developed world to vaccinate the whole world. We'd already had variants that could evade the vaccines/prior infection to a significant degree, but Delta happened to emerge and beat them with its sheer super transmissibility. I just didn't understand why anyone could be complacent, but basically everyone who mattered was.

And now we are panicking yet again. It's frustrating.

And it goes without saying that travel ban punishes you for your honesty. The South African economy will take a major hit because of this.

Still, I'm not against travel ban. It's absolutely stupid, counterproductive even, but politically rational. It won't do shit, but that's not the point. That's never the point, given our general stupidity.

[miscmisc]

Twitter's success didn't happen because of Jack Dorsey but did despite his toxic presence. That much is pretty obvious, and good riddance really.

[miscmisc]

LOL @ "solving"

With this logic Japanese police would be awesome enough to solve nearly all the criminal cases.

The NYPD weren't "solving" shit before the pandemic, certainly not "nearly 90% of murders."